Marital Compassion: the acid test

But beyond sympathy, there is need for empathy in marriage. Here we are focusing on more than productive thoughts towards each other, but seeking rather to share emotional realities. As one biblical writer puts it “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” and doubly so, with one’s life partner. However we must never lose sight of the benefit of two - “if one falls down, his friend can help him up… though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves”. So, in addition sympathy and empathy, we should also be applying “inclusion” in our marital context.

“Inclusion” for relational therapist Martin Buber, involves crossing over to “the other person’s side” in mind and emotion, without surrendering or giving up one’s own stance on the issue - as can happen in case of intense empathy. Here we remind ourselves that marriage is not a union but a fusion, where the expression, management and merging of “individual differences” form a vital cornerstone in the building process. “Inclusion” seeks to honestly and continually add the facts and experiences of my spouse to my own, as we strive to implement a third, joined perspective. Inclusion encompasses sympathy, empathy and reconciliation of my inner world actualities with that of my spouse - one integrated marriage being enjoyed.

Yet going still further is the acid test of marital compassion. A marital compassion in which I not only thinking, feeling and including, but also “becoming”. I constrain myself to become whatever my spouse needs for him or her to achieve fullness or wholesomeness. This is perhaps more easily seen and understood in the sphere of disabilities with marriages. For example, I become my husband’s eyes for his blindness or his lifelong nurse for his bed-ridden condition or his everpresent driver after his driving years are finished, and vice versa.

However marital compassion is also essential for other, less noticeable, individual deficiencies. The deficits that do not just result from poor, unlearnt behavior, but from actual human flaws of character - the ten to five percent of my spouse that did not, and perhaps will never, change! I become the “central bank” for my “easy-spending” spouse, the “maintenance manager” for my “use-and-discard” partner, the “spiritual backbone” for my “materiallyminded” husband or the children’s “academic coach” for my otherwise-inclined wife.

Marital compassion is an acid-test because it often involves becoming something in additional to one’s natural leaning. It is a personal, longterm commitment as the only solution that closes otherwise, “impossible” gaps and allows the marriage to continue going forward. Though a lot of time, energy, effort and sometimes money may be expended, this may not always be readily recognized or appreciated by the other party. The good book says “God made him sin who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”.

Marital sympathy, empathy, inclusion and compassion are all indispensable carriages of the relationship train that kept us on the marital tracks leading to the desired destination of fulfilling fusion -saying “we can do it, we will do it and we will do it together!”